Nearly 70% of organizations believed that this larger pool of remote workers will hinder their ability to meet compliance regulations.
A year into the pandemic, organizations are still grappling with how to protect their assets. In a new survey, nearly 80% of respondents see data leakage as the greatest potential threat.
The 2021 State of Remote Work Security Report reveals additional insights into the status of organizations’ efforts to secure the new workforce, key challenges and unique security threats, technology gaps and investment priorities.
archTIS, a global technology provider of innovative solutions for secure collaboration of sensitive information, and subsidiary Nucleus Cyber today announced the publication of the 2021 State of Remote Work Security report that was produced in collaboration with Cybersecurity Insiders. Survey results gathered from 289 security leaders and practitioners who are part of the 500,000 member Cybersecurity Insiders community found that while 90% of organizations are likely to continue supporting a remote workforce, more than three-quarters of respondents (79%) reported they had concerns about potential security risks being introduced by an increasingly distributed workforce.
“With the onset of the global pandemic, organizations across all industries were forced to suddenly accommodate a dramatic surge in their remote workforce and as a result, security teams are now grappling with an increasing range of risk factors,” said Holger Schulze, CEO and Founder of Cybersecurity Insiders. “It is little surprise that the most pervasive concern shared by those surveyed was the potential leakage of sensitive data with such a large percentage of employees and contractors working from home – a security scenario that few organizations had ever anticipated. Organizations need to consider different approaches to the problem than ‘business-as-usual’ training and awareness to solve this long-term challenge.”
The rapid shift to a remote-first working environment has not only fundamentally changed the way security teams are prioritizing how they should protect their network and data, it’s also greatly expanded the potential attack surface for external threat actors while making it easier for employees, contractors and guests with access to company data to either intentionally or accidentally expose sensitive data and files. The broad adoption of cloud-based applications and collaboration tools, the erosion of the traditional network perimeter, and the lack of visibility into user activity has further compounded the challenge of ensuring a secure remote workforce.
Some of the other key findings from the 2021 State of Remote Work Security report include:
- Almost half of those surveyed (46%) considered sensitive data leaving the perimeter as one of the top challenges of managing a remote workforce.
- Collaboration applications are a top security concern including file sharing (68%), video conferencing (45%), and messaging (35%).
- More than 60 percent of respondents believed that users mixing personal and corporate devices has degraded their security protocols.
- Seventy percent of organizations believed that this larger pool of remote workers will hinder their ability to meet compliance regulations such as GDPR and HIPAA
- To better meet the challenge of protecting their remote workforce more than a third (34%) of organizations plan to prioritize human-centric visibility technologies, followed by next-generation anti-virus and endpoint detection and response (23%), improved network analysis and next-gen firewalls (22%), and Zero Trust Network Access (19%).
The Pandemic is changing our Security Concepts.In order to ensure that a company’s data remains fully safeguarded we must also extend these fine grained controls to the file level, which is precisely the value that Nucleus Cyber and archTIS bring to the market.”
The archTIS portfolio of solutions protect against insider threats and ensure secure collaboration of sensitive, classified and top-secret content. Dynamic, attribute-based access control (ABAC) enables fine grained security to reduce risk and enforce Zero Trust at the file level. archTIS products include Kojensi, a multi-government certified platform for the secure access, sharing and collaboration of sensitive, classified and top secret information; and NC Protect for enhanced information protection for file access and sharing, messaging and emailing of sensitive and classified content across Microsoft 365 apps, Dropbox, Nutanix Files and Windows file shares.
For more information and a copy of Cybersecurity Insiders’ 2021 State of Remote Work report visit:
